Media and the Totalitarian Society: Spectacle, ‘Simulacra’ and the Construction of (un)Reality in Communist Romania

Abstract

Abstract The present article intends to offer a brief analysis of the ways in which the media can be used by totalitarian regimes as a means of manipulation and control with the ultimate goal to secure their political power. The emphasis is placed on a special case of manipulation through media, namely the huge spectacles staged on stadiums and always meant to be shown on television with the purpose to praise the achievements of the party and to glorify the great leader. The spectacle is presented not only as an obligatory part of the ‘personality cult’, but is analysed as a complex phenomenon having as first objective the manufacturing of a new reality to correspond to the utopian project of the perfect communist society. People have to be made to believe that there is no other reality than the one constructed and presented by the spectacle and the huge propaganda machine of the totalitarian regime. Staging, functioning with the merciless precision of clockwork, includes music, poetry, interpretation of historical characters and presentation of heroic events and those special pictures formed with the aid of flashcards or by the rapid movements of the bodies of the participants in the show. The paper aims to prove that these spectacles may be regarded as ‘world’ projections which acquire an ontological dimension of their own and in so doing it analyses the structural components used for their construction. The article starts from various media culture theories, including Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, but tries to build a model of analysis based on multiple perspectives applying a series of concepts used by postmodern cultural theories, such as Brian McHale's notion of world projection, Jean Baudrillard's ‘simulacra’ or Frederic Jameson's insightful commentaries on the Romanian communist regime.